n. disillusionment upon rewatching a beloved pop-culture touchstone of your youth and having to confront its hand-puppet characterization, magnetic-poetry dialogue, jury-rigged plots and undisguised pandering to its audience, all of which—by the power of Grayskull—makes you wonder what else in your mental fridge is past its expiration date.

n. an innocuous touch by someone just doing their job—a barber, yoga instructor or friendly waitress—that you enjoy more than you’d like to admit, a feeling of connection so stupefyingly simple that it cheapens the power of the written word, so that by the year 2025, aspiring novelists would be better off just giving people a hug.

n. the phenomenon of observing your parents interact with people they grew up with, which reboots their personalities into youth mode, reverting to a time before the last save point, when they were still dreamers and rascals cooling their heels in the wilderness, waiting terrified and eager to meet you for the first time.

n. the lucky fascination felt when a typo immeasurably improves a sentence you wrote, singed by the underlying recognition that the book of your life is credited to you but is not in your handwriting, which nevertheless appears in trace passages of many other lives.

n. the moment when your enjoyment of something you’ve adored since you were a kid—riding bikes, taking photos, eating, running around—evaporates on contact with hardcore fanatics whose ferocious obsession with technique sounds as satisfying as slurping through the last airy dregs of a slushie, which gives you the emotional equivalent of brain freeze.